Title: The Ship of Fools Author: Gregory Norminton Publisher: Sceptre Hanging in the Louvre is the painting by Heironymous Bosch which gives this book both its title and the front cover. The painting also serves as the primary source of narrative for Gregory Norminton’s debut novel, an audacious literary gambit that takes each of the characters from the painting and gives them, well, character. Norminton has crafted his novel on the assumption that each of the characters has a tale to tell, and thus stranded on the ship going nowhere, each of them proceed to tell the boat a fable, with or without moral, to pass the time. It’s a bold move which, to a large degree, pays off. The stories told are bizarre enough to please even Bosch. One a wonderful semi-sea shanty about a woman who begins her life being raised by pigs, only to become a prostitute welcomed by kings, whose eventual death liberates an abbey. Another is a tale of friendship surpassing traditional boundaries only to be doomed to madness by one friend’s wily ways. Yet another tells the tale of someone dreaming they are in a strange room, looking at a strange man with strange mechanised objects, one a bleached bone which “he picks...up and soothes it with his voice” when it wails. Is the character dreaming the narrated author, or is the author writing about the characters in his dream watching him creating the narration? Post-modernism - thy chickens have come home! While The Ship of Fools is very clever, it’s also difficult to get through. The text can be dense and circular at times, and in an age of reduced attention span a plot that quite literally goes nowhere can be hard to adjust to. However it’s not necessarily a bad thing and Norminton, only 25, shows fine skill in balancing the tugging edges. Logical comparisons have been drawn to Kafka and the Argentine masters Cortazar and Borges and the longest tale in the book could well be the cousin of Borges’ “The Library of Babel”. In the age of Borges and Kafka, there seemed less distractions and The Ship of Fools would have been a perfect tome to sit alongside these now-accepted greats. But in 2002, with the internet, cable TV, 16 different game machines and all the other distractions of modern day life Norminton asks us, in the process of reading a dense, time-consuming yet ultimately rewarding novel, what value do we give to the story, to narrative, to tales of magic, superstition and foolery? With such seemingly-huge questions asked in his first book as well as mastering the skill of conventional and post-narratives, it will be interesting indeed to see where he goes next.